Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay Democracy and Development in Antebellum America

This selection of letters, essays, and speeches demonstrates how the clashing perspectives of two individuals shaped and exemplified the major issues of national politics between the War of 1812 and the territorial crisis of 1850 the preservation of the union, federal commitments to banking, tariffs, internal improvements, and the egalitarian tone of national political culture.

Harry L. Watson is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He coedits Southern Cultures, a quarterly journal, and has published three scholarly books as well as numerous articles. His 1983 An Independent People: The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1750-1820 was co-recipient of the AHA's James Harvey Robinson Award. Watson's most recent book, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (1990), is considered the most cogent synthesis of Jacksonian politics in a generation of scholarship. Professor Watson has been a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, and he lectures widely in the United States and Abroad.